Education Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel’s line snaps like a manifesto disguised as a proverb: modern desire is data, ancient achievement is law. The first clause opens the door to appetite and contingency - “what the moderns want” makes poetry sound like a living art tugged by new publics, new media, new nerves. Poetry, in that view, “should become” something responsive, even opportunistic: it learns from demand, from the pressures of the present, from whatever the age cannot stop craving.

Then Schlegel tightens the screw. “From what the ancients did, what poetry must be” drags the argument out of trend and into constraint. The ancients aren’t offered as nostalgic comfort; they’re installed as a standard of necessity. “Did” is doing a lot of work: not what they theorized, but what they executed - forms, techniques, a level of finish, an idea of wholeness. Schlegel’s subtext is a Romantic anxiety: if modernity is fragmentation (specialization, speed, the market), poetry risks dissolving into mere expression. The classical tradition becomes a corrective, a ballast that keeps innovation from turning into noise.

Historically, this is early German Romanticism’s balancing act: arguing for the legitimacy of the new while refusing to sever the line of inheritance. Schlegel isn’t picking sides so much as building a two-source engine: the present supplies impetus, the past supplies obligation. It works because it flatters modern ambition while refusing modern self-sufficiency. Poetry gets permission to evolve, but not permission to forget what excellence already looked like.